The 15 sketch plugins I’ve gotten the most value from this year

What I absolutely love about Sketch is that whenever I encounter a problem, or must subject myself to performing a mind-numbing task, I can most often count on its community to have developed a solution (i.e. plugin) tailored to my specific needs.

Below, a list of those I’ve personally used the most. YMMV, but I hope this helps!

Before jumping into the thick of things, a quick legend:

🔥 You should definitely try it out :)
🔥🔥 There is simply no reason not to have this installed :O
🔥🔥🔥 I couldn’t live without this and neither will you ;)

Now, without further ado…

Sketchpacks 🔥🔥🔥

While the rest of the list will be ordered alphabetically, and Sketchpacks technically isn’t even a plugin (😅), this is the first tool you’ll need to download as it will allow you to find, download, and manage your (and your team’s) plugins.

Alternatively, you can browse GitHub for an exhaustive list of all the plugins that exist out there. Happy hunting.

Anima 🔥

Anima has made very impressive strides in the past few months in rivaling Invision as a presentation, prototyping, and hand-off solution. What does Anima do better? Responsive layouts, and the integration of animations, which will also port over to the prototype- adding that much more *oomph* to your presentation.

An intriguing feature (which I admit I haven’t had the chance to test yet) is the ability to host your work online, with no coding required. Similar to Webflow, albeit with not as steep of a learning curve. Their site is worth checking out.

Automate Sketch 🔥

This is one I’ll just have to let you guys download in order to understand how much of a godsend it can be. The reason I can’t even attempt to explain what it does is that it packs a lot of features, as shown in the GIF above.

Collapse Artboards And Groups 🔥🔥🔥

I’ve probably gotten more mileage from this plugin than all the others combined. As its name implies, this simple plugin is a great time saver for anyone with a mild OCD (which is something all designers develop over time).

When your Pages and Artboards lists are fighting for screen real estate, a quick ⌘+control+c will help to mediate any side-panel tension. Also a great source of validation for those who subscribe to sweeping untidiness under the rug. Alternatively, you may create a custom shortcut in your system preferences.

Cleanup Useless Groups 🔥🔥

Self-explanatory. A bit finicky, as you need to make sure that no layers are selected for it to scan through your entire document (otherwise it’ll only delete the empty groups in the layer(s) you’ve selected, if any).

Sketch already does delete empty groups automatically if their contents are deleted. This plugin is handy when the layers are removed from the group manually (i.e. dragged out).

Craft by Invision 🔥🔥🔥

Most should know about this one. It allows you to export your screens to its parent platform, create a prototype (as a better alternative to Sketch’s own prototyping tools), preview your prototype (also serves as an alternative to Sketch’s Preview, though a lot more sluggish), upload your Shared styles and symbols to a Design System Manager should you wish to make use of the platform, replace your lorem ipsum with dummy text, insert pictures from Unsplash… and much more.

Map Generator 🔥

This plugin allows you to generate maps from either Google Maps or Mapbox. With the former, you also have the option of importing code from Snazzymaps, a site hosting a cornucopia of styles for Google Maps.

Material Theme Editor 🔥

Fleshing out an app using Material Design’s guidelines has never been so straightforward. This plugin is, in essence, a repository of all its components, letting you change the colors, shapes and typography at will.

Merge Duplicate Symbols 🔥

As an unintended plug for Figma and Abstract, sometimes collaborating on projects with a coworker will have you importing artboards from a different file into yours. Unfortunately, even if both files branched out from the same ‘master’, Sketch won’t recognize the symbols as being the same, and thus create duplicates - resulting in a very messy symbols page. This plugin will take care of tidying up your assets. Very neat.

Rename-It 🔥🔥🔥

Everyone has wished at least once for an easy way to get rid of the pesky ‘Copy #’ that somehow suffixes every_single_layer_copy 2. Well, this is what you’ve been looking for. This plugin allows you to add a prefix or suffix to a batch of layers, number them, or even make them adopt their parents’ names (or vice-versa).

Reverse 🔥🔥🔥

This plugin will allow you to reverse the order of the selected layers. This is especially useful when creating duplicates by alt-dragging in the viewport, as the new instance will supplant the original in the layers panel, which isn’t always ideal.

Runner 🔥🔥🔥

Spotlight Search (⌘+space) for Sketch. You can use it to run a plugin, insert symbols, create a style or apply one to a selected layer. You can even use it look for other plugins to install. I mainly use it to insert symbols from shared libraries, though you may want to avoid having a lot of active libraries, as this can really bog down performance.

Search Everywhere 🔥

This handy plugin will find that one layer you lost track of. Alternatively, you can use CMD+F to apply a filter to your layers list (I actually just found out about this while writing this article :P).

SVGO Compressor 🔥🔥

It seems odd to me that this wouldn’t be a default Sketch feature, as it was developed by Bohemian themselves, and there’s little reason not to have this activated. In any case, once installed, this plugin will automatically compress SVGs right as you export them. Note that imageoptim exists for all your other image optimization needs.

Unsplash 🔥🔥

For some reason, using Invision’s Craft plugin to import images from Unsplash consistently yields downscaled and pixelated photos. Given that it also constrains you into picking a photo from a limited categories list, I much prefer using this plugin, as it allows you to generate a random picture, or look for one matching an inputted term.

Symbol Organizer 🔥

After you’ve cleaned up your useless groups, merged the duplicates, and used proper nomenclature for your layers, this plugin will take care of the last stretch, organizing your symbols neatly via a comprehensive modal.

I would consider hunting for plugins a genuine hobby of mine. It is also the biggest contributing factor to my unwillingness to try out other tools.

Fortunately, amidst the growth of these competing platforms, Bohemian has just announced support for team collaboration and a version of Sketch that’ll run entirely in the browser, with both features slated for launch later this year (Figma’s role in this sudden turn of events must be recognized). And for these reasons, I must say that Sketch’s feature is looking bright. ☀️

Cheers and thank you for reading!

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